A comparison of cirrus radiative and mass properties between the SPARTICUS and MACPEX flight campaigns
Poster PDF
Authors
Michael Christian Schwartz — Space Dynamics Laboratory
Gerald Mace — University of Utah
Paul Lawson — SPEC, Inc.
Category
Cloud Properties
Description
The ARM Small Particles in Cirrus (SPARTICUS) campaign collected 150 hours of midlatitude cirrus cloud in situ measurements during the period January to June 2010. The NASA Midlatitude Airborne Cirrus Properties Experiment (MACPEX) collected similar measurements during April 2011. During both campaigns, distributions of cirrus particle size, cross-sectional area, and mass were reported from measurements made via the 2D Stereo Probe (2D-S). These distributions, particularly those of particle cross-sectional area, relate to the radiative properties of cirrus clouds, and comparisons of these measurements between the two flight campaigns are made. This poster furthermore demonstrates use of these data to construct empirical relationships between particle maximum dimension and both particle cross-sectional area and particle mass. The resulting relationships are compared between the two flight campaigns. As such relationships are frequently used as part of cirrus property retrieval algorithms, an analysis of the uncertainty in one such algorithm due to uncertainty in these relationships is also demonstrated.
